Tag: James Njoroge

Read the Year End Summary of Organizing Fellows, Tony Ngala and James Njoroge. James and Tony are running a campaign in Kanyerere to mobilize parents involvement in their children’s education. Part 1 Found Here.

The truth is all this activities happening in this sub-location and its neighborhoods are really helpful and indeed they have helped many people in the community but having a look at the community, it’s still the same, same challenges same cycle being repeated over and over, the community continues to drawn in the ocean of dependency and strongly believe they need someone to come and fix their problems for them, they actually cannot do it because they do not have the resources, Money, skills and Support.

Organizers get into the community and have one on ones with different people in Kanyerere all getting their views on how they see child poverty in Kanyerere and the stories they share are heart breaking. We met parents one on one shared our experiences, build relationships and called community info session, all having conversation to get to the root cause of all these challenges our children are facing.

From our work in the community it is evident that the community knows its challenges better and knows how what needs to be done in order to get to the change they want to see, there the idea of bringing projects in the community does not work out as compared to getting the community together although the process of identifying the challenge, developing leaders who are chosen by the community and lastly coming up with an initiative that addresses child poverty.

Read the Year End Summary of Organizing Fellows, Tony Ngala and James Njoroge. James and Tony are running a campaign in Kanyerere to mobilize parents involvement in their children’s education.

We have been running a campaign in Kanyerere which is a sub location of the Nkaimurunya ward, Kajiado North constituency, Kajiado County. When you take a walk in Kanyerere at during the day you will see children who are walking around collecting plastics containers and scrap metal, others are seated in groups smoking cigarettes or bhang, others have not yet joined school despite them having attained the right age for preschool, others are on the malls asking for food, money and any concerned person would try to fix the challenge either by giving the small children money to buy food or turn the off by telling them “enda shule ukasome, masomo in ya bure” which means “go to school and study , education is for free”. We (organizers) have heard that over and over again. We take a brave step of meeting parents at Kanyerere on what is happening in this community, why is this happening?

Kanyerere is composed of people from different communities all over Kenya which makes it difficult for them to work together since some of them are tribal. The leadership Structure of the community is dormant and is influenced by key stakeholders who get people they want into the leadership of the community. Most people in Kanyerere are not employed they depend mainly on manual labor done by the man and male youths and vegetable shops which is mostly done by the women and female youth. We also have local brews (Changaa, Muratina, karovo etc.) where most men and some women after coming from work go into the places and spend all money they had and end up going home without money to buy food or even buy books for their children, and a continuous abuse of alcohol leads to drug addiction.

The community also has many projects going on, from sponsorship to the orphaned children Eg CFCA,Compassionate etc, The major churches around have extend their hand and give clothes, food, stationary to the vulnerable children. The Banks and Microfinances are also getting into the community giving people group loans to boast their businesses, to start small businesses, and also table banking. This results to having so many small groups of people passionately looking for money which leads to good relationships among the members of the group and also bad relationships especially where one is unable to repay a loan and the whole group is made to bare the consequence. There is also lots of awareness campaigns by other non government organizations on HIV/AIDS, Governance , Community Health, Family Matters and many more and all of them are addressing a challenge they are seeing in the community…

Keep reading Friday to learn how Tony and James overcame these challenges.

James Njoroge, Tatua Community Organising Fellow in Madika, updates us on the campaign in Rongai to to get parents to take responsibility for their kids going to school.

Today most 1:1’s I did proved to me that most members in Kware want to point fingers and blame the government for some of the challenges facing them and their children. I took the chance to challenge them during our conversations and ask if there is anything they could do as individuals to change this. When asked that they gave me lots of answers.

I then asked if they would come together to work on this as community organising is about bring the community together, not just individuals. This showed me the common challenge in most of the community to not want to come together and forget their differences to make a difference.

James Njoroge, Tatua Community Organising Fellow in Mandika, updates us on the hope forming around the the campaign in Mandika to get parents to take responsibility for their kids going to school.

Mary Onyanfo says since she moved in Mandika she has known that there have been two girls who have been left by their parents and are living with the grandparents. The grandparents are not taking the girls to school and that has been hurting her and when I told her about our campaign she is happy because she is at least going to help the kids though the involvement of the community.